[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every ... Read More »

[The following petition was issued in December 2015 in the aftermath and in opposition to comments made by Celal Sengor in an interview.]
Dear members of the Committee on Human Rights of the NAS, NAE, and NAM,
We are writing to bring to your attention the deplorable remarks made recently by Celal Sengor, a Turkish ... Read More »

[The following call for action was issued by Giiltan Kianak on behlaf of the Union of Southeastern Anatolia Region Municipalities.]
Union of Southeastern Anatolia Region Municialities
Urgent Call for Solidarity and Action
In the course of armed conflict that restarted in the Kurdish region of Turkey after ... Read More »

It is only possible to make sense of what is going on in Kurdistan today by way of its homology with the American occupation of Iraq. Because in Kurdistan, the state and resistance to the state do not share any legal or social foundations whatsoever. We are in fact discussing two entirely separate worlds that can only ... Read More »

Tahir Elçi, the president of the bar association in southeastern Diyarbakır province and a determined Kurdish human rights lawyer, was shot dead on Saturday, 28 November, during a press statement he had delivered in Diyarbakır. Photos of Elçi’s dead body lying on the ground quickly overwhelmed social media accounts, ... Read More »

Anthony Gorman and Sossie Kasbarian, editors, Diasporas of the Modern Middle East: Contextualizing Community. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Universtiry Press, 2015.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this book?
Sossie Kasbarian (SK): The book came out of a workshop that we convened at the University of Edinburgh in ... Read More »

In the wake of the murderous attacks in Paris, we can expect western heads of state to do what they always do in such circumstances: declare total and unremitting war on those who brought it about. They don’t actually mean it. They’ve had the means to uproot and destroy Islamic State within their hands for over a year ... Read More »

A number of scholars working in the fields of geography, sociology, and political science have developed the concept of “new wars” to talk about the state we are living in the last two decades.[1] These scholars claim that currently, we are going through a fourth world war—that is, of course, if we would call the cold ... Read More »

Historians of the Middle East have long ignored the middle class in general and the activities of Arab capitalists in particular. For many, capitalism is synonymous with colonialism, and prevailing narratives have not been able to accommodate entrepreneurs who resist characterization as “comprador” allies of colonial ... Read More »

The mood was tense as the election results came in to the local office of the progressive People’s Democratic Party (HDP) in the town of Erzurum in eastern Turkey. This is a very conservative region on the invisible border between nationalist Turkish Anatolia and the Kurdish region. The HDP’s office was filled with ... Read More »

In the days following the 1 November election, Turkey’s pro-government newspapers have depicted a bright future for the nation. Writing for Yeni Şafak, one columnist explained that the government could now move forward with constitutional and economic reforms, albeit vaguely defined ones. In Yeni Akit, another ... Read More »

Grandchildren: New Geographies of Belonging, DEPO-Istanbul, opened 3 September 2015.
Anniversaries are pretexts for remembering decisive moments in history, for interpreting them with the help of added data and research material, and filling gaps in existing accounts about them. Retrospection is employed here to ... Read More »

Three weeks ago, Russia started to directly intervene in Syria. The proxy war between Russia and Iran on the one hand, and the United States and Saudi Arabia on the other, threatens to turn into an actual war. Having lost control over its “victories” in the last fourteen years, the United States would rather keep this ... Read More »

La masacre de Ankara y el Estado como asesino en serie en la Turquía de Erdogan
[This article was originally written by Emrah Yildiz, and published by Jadaliyya in English. It was translated into Spanish by Sinfo Fernández and was published in Spanish on Rebelión.]
Poco después de que las noticias ... Read More »

Bath houses or hammams were fundamental fixtures of cities and towns throughout the Ottoman world. Western travelers and writers were drawn to the exotic allure of bath houses as spaces associated with leisure and eroticism, which featured prominently in orientalist tropes concerning Europe’s Islamic other. This ... Read More »

Last Saturday, two powerful bombs turned a peaceful rally in Ankara into into a bloody nightmare. According to the People’s Democratic Party's (HDP) estimates, 128 people have been killed and over five hundred injured.
The anger against the government of president Erodgan became evident in the immediate aftermath of ... Read More »

[The following statement was released in English, French, Turkish, and German on 17 October 2015. To sign on to this petition, please click here.]
Call by Academics for International Solidarity after the Ankara Bombing
In the wake of the atrocious bomb attack in Ankara on 10 October that killed over a hundred ... Read More »

In Ankara, on 10 October, a few minutes after 10am, two of us (Alp and Max) were on our way to the “Labor, Peace and Democracy” rally. We were a little late and just entering the crowd, rushing towards the train station to meet with others, when the first bomb struck two hundred meters ahead. It all happened at ... Read More »

According to the official figures, 97 civilians died in a deadly blast in Ankara on Saturday although the death toll is contested.[1] They were there to participate in the peace rally organized by leftist associations, syndicates, and unions. Many NGOs and People’s Democratic Party (HDP) representatives and supporters ... Read More »

As many as 128 people died in Turkey Saturday when nearly simultaneous explosions ripped through a pro-peace rally in the country’s capital of Ankara. More than 245 people were injured. The bombs went off just as Kurdish groups, trade unions and leftist organizations were preparing to begin a march protesting the ... Read More »

Shortly after the news of the Ankara massacre started circulating on social media, a video surfaced, showing the very moment of the first explosion, foregrounded by a group of young peace rally participants on a line of halay. The protesters were singing and dancing to prominent ozan Ruhi Su’s “Ellerinde Pankartlar,” ... Read More »

On 10 October 2015, two bombs were detonated in the midst of a mass rally ("The Labor, Democracy, and Peace Meeting) in Ankara, callled for by the trade unions KESK and DISK as well as other civil society organizations. At least ninety-five people were killed in the attacks, according to state sources (other ... Read More »

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every ... Read More »

When I was growing up in Amman, where my parents had finally landed as refugees from Palestine, we had a valise where we kept folds of photographs, faded images with wrinkled edges, the oldest ones—just a handful--going back to the early 1910s. The valise was a repository of the cruel itinerary of both branches of my ... Read More »

The Justice and Development Party (AKP), ruling Turkey as the sole party since 2002, finds itself in a deep and longstanding crisis of hegemony. The first blow it suffered from below was the June Uprising in 2013. Ever since, the AKP and first Prime Minister then President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who de facto owns the ... Read More »

About Turkey Page

Jadaliyya’s Turkey Page features exclusive and in-depth coverage by contributors on the ground in Turkey as well as outside observers, from a wide range of perspectives. We aim to enrich the coverage of Turkey throughout the English-language media, to generate new critical conversations, and to translate work being published in Turkish for an English-language audience. We welcome submissions in both English and Turkish. If you wish to contribute to this page, send your material to Turkey@Jadaliyya.com or click below: